After Pearl Harbor, President Roosevelt, claiming a never documented
"military necessity," ordered the removal and incarceration of 120,000
Japanese Americans during World War II solely because of their ancestry.
As Roger Daniels movingly describes, almost all reluctantly obeyed
their government and went peacefully to the desolate camps provided for
them.

Daniels, however, focuses on four Nisei, second-generation
Japanese Americans, who, aided by a handful of lawyers, defied the
government and their own community leaders by challenging the
constitutionality of the government's orders. The 1942 convictions of
three men--Min Yasui, Gordon Hirabayashi, and Fred Korematsu--who
refused to go willingly were upheld by the Supreme Court in 1943 and
1944. But a woman, Mitsuye Endo, who obediently went to camp and then
filed for a writ of habeas corpus, won her case. The Supreme Court
subsequently ordered her release in 1944, following her two and a half
years behind barbed wire.

Neither the cases nor the fate of
law-abiding Japanese attracted much attention during the turmoil of
global warfare; in the postwar decades they were all but forgotten.
Daniels traces how, four decades after the war, in an America whose
attitudes about race and justice were changing, the surviving Japanese
Americans achieved a measure of political and legal justice. Congress
created a commission to investigate the legitimacy of the wartime
incarceration. It found no military necessity, but rather that the
causes were "race prejudice, war hysteria, and a failure of political
leadership." In 1982 it asked Congress to apologize and award $20,000 to
each survivor. A bill providing that compensation was finally passed
and signed into law in 1988.

There is no way to undo a Supreme
Court decision, but teams of volunteer lawyers, overwhelmingly
Sansei--third-generation Japanese Americans--used revelations in 1983
about the suppression of evidence by federal attorneys to persuade lower
courts to overturn the convictions of Hirabayashi and Korematsu.

Daniels
traces the continuing changes in attitudes since the 1980s about the
wartime cases and offers a sobering account that resonates with
present-day issues of national security and individual freedom.

A few blurbs:

"Daniels has a well-deserved reputation as a leading historian on this
subject. Here, he ably recounts the legal challenges to their internment
by four young Japanese Americans, which resulted in Supreme Court
decisions that still provoke debate and denunciation. He also brings
this story up to date with accounts of the successful effort in the
1980s to vacate their criminal convictions and promote 'redress and
reparations' on behalf of all victims. This book is a timely reminder of
a shameful episode in American history."--Peter Irons, author of Justice at War: The Story of the Japanese-American Internment Cases

"In
this revealing study, Daniels demonstrates how seemingly ordinary
people asserted their constitutional rights against all odds. He
analyzes judicial opinions and unearths internal divisions among
government officials and conflicts among lawyers representing both
sides. A must-read for all concerned with justice in America."--Eileen
H. Tamura, author of In Defense of Justice: Joseph Kurihara and the Japanese American Struggle for Equality